”Richard Edward Sheldon is a lumber dealer in Wellington. He was born in Washington county, Kansas, near the city of Hollenberg, on December 22, 1868, a son of William and Mary (Dunnick) Sheldon, the father born in Pittsfield township, Lorain county, Ohio, and the mother in Indiana. William Sheldon served in the Civil war as a member of Company F, Third Ohio Cavalry, and after the close of the war he moved to Kansas and subsequently to Illinois, where he is yet living.

Richard E. Sheldon was bereft of his mother when but a child, and after her death he was reared by his maternal grandparents until he attained his sixth year. He came to Wellington in 1883, and during the following six years he worked on farms in this vicinity, returning at the close of that period to Illinois, where he learned the carpenter’s trade of his father. After about a couple of years in Illinois he returned to Wellington, was next in the west for a time, and returning once more to this city he took up the carpenter’s trade. He worked as a carpenter for one man for eleven years, and he then engaged in the business for himself, and in the intervening time has built many of Wellington’s leading structures. On January 6, 1905, he began business as a lumber merchant in this city.

Mr. Sheldon married Sarah Alida Ware, born in Missouri but they were married in Wellington, and she is a daughter of Joseph and Sophronia (Wray) Ware.”

Source:  History of the Western Reserve, Vol. 3, by Harriet Taylor Upton, The Lewis Publishing Co., Chicago and New York, 1910, page 1754